Monday, July 23, 2012

Damn. Where will we go for dinner now?

Wendy and Jim Campbell served their last dinner on Saturday
night. Their regular customers – and there were quite a few of them – will be
bereft.

Wendy and Jim ran The French Bistro in Martinborough. The
genial Jim was the front-of-house man and Wendy did the cooking (and in the
early days, before they could afford staff, the washing-up too).

The French Bistro won the Cuisine award for best regional casual dining restaurant in 2008
and once earned the rare distinction of a glowing mention in the New York Times
by the late R W Apple Jr, an associate editor of the paper and noted traveller
and bob vivant.

As the name implies, The French Bistro served French-inspired
cuisine based on local, seasonal produce. The menu, elegantly hand-written by
Jim, changed constantly, depending on what was fresh.

The food was exemplary. Some of the most enjoyable dinners
my wife and I have had were eaten there. But after 10 years of hard work, Wendy
and Jim (that’s their son John on TV3) have decided it’s time to ease off.

They closed without fuss or fanfare. They will be missed not
just by their many loyal supporters in the Wairarapa but also by weekenders from
Wellington for whom dinner at The French Bistro was the high point of a visit to Martinborough.

2 comments:

The only time I ever tried to get into the French Bistro, Jim was rude and dismissive because they were full that night (and because I think he was drunk). We knew it was popular and as we were in Martinborough for a couple of days, we were happy to book for the following night, but Jim did not give us to the chance.

I've heard lot of similar stories such as this review from MenuMania, "Even before entering I was accosted by the M/D who very rudely made our intended visit very ugly," and this one from DineOut, "the rather unfriendly maitre'd, refused to seat us because we were 12 minutes late...[despite there being] two available tables."

The upside of our experience with Jim is that we discovered Tirohana Estate and Cornucopia at Aylstone, both of which are superb and which have benefited from repeated visits and recommendations from us ever since.

I too have read negative reviews of The French Bistro, along with many glowing ones. One thing I've noted about review sites, both here and overseas, is that they attract people who seem determined to find fault with everything and derive a perverse satisfaction from painstakingly itemising all the ways in which an establishment (whether it's a restaurant, hotel, B&B or whatever) has failed to match their exacting expectations. You note yourself that the restaurant was fully booked. Many of the complaints I've read give the impression of having been written in a fit of pique because someone couldn't get in. Not a bad problem for a restaurant to have.

About Me

I am a freelance journalist and columnist living in the Wairarapa region of New Zealand. In the presence of Greenies I like to boast that I walk to work each day - I've paced it out and it's about 15 metres. I write about all sorts of stuff: politics, the media, music, wine, films, cycling and anything else that piques my interest - even sport, though I admit I don't have the intuitive understanding of sport that most New Zealand males absorb as if by osmosis. I'm a former musician (bass and guitar) with a lifelong love of music that led me to write my book 'A Road Tour of American Song Titles: From Mendocino to Memphis', published by Bateman NZ in July 2016. I've been in journalism for more than 40 years and like many journalists I know a little bit about a lot of things and probably not enough about anything. I have never won any journalism awards.